Radical 'legend' never lost his fire

By John Doherty, Standard-Times staff writer

NEW BEDFORD -- Toward the end of his life, frail, graying and with a spider-web crack on the lens of his crumbling glasses, Parky Grace could still make comfortable people nervous.

Reflective and agitated this past August as the 29th anniversary of his arrest for murder passed, Frank "Parky" Grace sat down with a reporter in Fall River's Regatta Restaurant.

As the lunch clientele of all white, mostly senior citizen diners shot him nervous glances, Mr. Grace held forth on a variety of topics: He described the casual brutality inside the Walpole State Prison, extolled the virtues of a vegetarian diet, recounted recent fist fights, and dissected the government's program of exterminating his beloved Black Panthers.

He began the meal by demanding, with a straight face, that the bartender hand over all the money. A joke, he explained. He ended it by announcing to the waitress that he had no money, and asked to be shown where he could wash the dishes in trade.

"I'm dying, man," he said at one point, staring out the window at the boats moored along the river.

On Monday, after two weeks in a Boston Veterans Administration Hospital where his liver gave out, Parky Grace, founder of New Bedford's Black Panther Party, Vietnam veteran, teacher, father and once-convicted of murder, died. He was 56.

Mr. Grace's passing sent ripples through the fragmented community of local radicals from the late 1960s and early 1970s that turned New Bedford and the nation on its ear.

"Parky wouldn't sit still for anything," said R. Carleen Cordwell, a member of the Panthers and one of many city supporters who fought to have Mr. Grace's 1974 murder conviction overturned. "People who didn't know him were afraid of him. If you knew him, you loved him."

And to a new generation of community activists, death has brought the fiery and contradictory Mr. Grace full legend status.

"He put himself out there for the things he believed in. You think of Parky and you think 'strong.' Period," said Tyson Rose, 28, a member of the Suns of Panthers, a community-building group in the city that borrows many of the Black Panthers' core beliefs. "At the age when most of the activists in his generation settled down and became 'grown-ups,' Parky didn't. He never changed. Parky is a legend."

Mr. Grace was one of the strongest links to a period of the city that in retrospect seems too weird, too intense to have really happened.

But it did happen, and at some of the most dramatic crossroads, Mr. Grace was there.

Growing up in New Bedford, Mr. Grace had a reputation as a kind, but tough, Cape Verdean kid.

"He was tough; he was a horror show. He was a very skilled fighter and he was very courageous," said Ms. Cordwell. "He wasn't afraid of anything."

He was drafted into the Army and saw combat duty in the Vietnam War -- an experience that left him with post-traumatic stress syndrome, he said this summer.

But it also left him radicalized.

Ms. Cordwell said many young black men returned from Vietnam with their eyes opened.

"The Vietnamese schooled a lot of the brothers," she said. "It's like they say, sometimes you don't get to know your country until you leave it."

Like many young black men, Mr. Grace began organizing.

He helped start a free-breakfast program for children in the city and the Panthers began organizing a battery of after-school programs. They took over city councilors' seats during meetings and demanded the administration address sub-standard housing, failing schools and police brutality.

They became affiliated with other radical causes, like the independence movement in the former Portuguese colonies of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau.

But there was trouble brewing.

Then, as now, drugs played a huge equation in city affairs.

"We were robbing drug dealers," said Ms. Cordwell. "We were putting them out of business and people were getting involved with them."

In 1970, nights of violence in the West End left blocks of houses burnt, and one man dead.

Two years later, Mr. Grace and his brother Ross were arrested for shooting a Providence drug dealer to death outside a social club.

They were both convicted, and a long campaign to free them was under way.

Mr. Grace didn't let prison stop him. He organized prisoners and agitated for better treatment. To slow him, he was transferred, again and again, to different federal prisons. He spent years in solitary confinement.

In 1985, his conviction was overturned, and the man who had come to embody unbreakable idealism returned to a city whose political fire had all but gone out.

"He came back to New Bedford and he was disappointed," said Jack Custodio, 87, himself a tireless activist. "He never changed."

He moved to the Boston area, and the last 10 years of his life are filled with gaps.

He worked at the Freedom House in Roxbury, a community nonprofit led by the Rev. Eugene Rivers.

He lived on and off with a couple in Medford, and was in their house when he finally checked himself into the hospital earlier this month.

But he drifted. He said over lunch at the Regatta he hated to spend too much time in New Bedford; many people who knew him as a street-tough Black Panther started arguments and fights with him to get a name for themselves. Worse, others knew nothing of his struggles, and paid him no mind at all.

Mr. Custodio, who also never lost his radical streak -- he spent a night in Ash Street Jail this month after disrupting another School Committee meeting and calling the mayor a racist -- hadn't talked to his kindred spirit for two years, he said.

"The thing about Uncle Parky was he was uncompromiseable," said his nephew Ross Park Jr., who himself has become a activist. He works at the Frederick Douglass Unity House at UMass Dartmouth. "That's a strength and a weakness."

For others, the legacy of Mr. Grace will be both a spur to action, and a caution.

The city's Black Panther organization was derailed by its involvement with criminal elements. That can be a lesson to the new generation of activists, some say.

"I'm not going to lie, I don't know everything about Parky and the Panthers," said Temistocles Ferreira, who works at YouthBuild and fronts hip-hop band Busted 'Fro. "The thing you get out of his story is the pride and the strength. But we also get to see where they fell off track. We can see how not to fall into the same traps. I wish there was a book we could go to learn about all these guys. I wish we had Parky Grace here now."

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